How Can We End the War on Gaza?
Published 10/1/2024
CALL TO ACTION
End the genocidal war on Gaza, the occupation, and all U.S. military aid to the Israeli state!
Fully fund Medicare for All including gender-affirming care & abortion, and massively invest in high quality affordable housing for working people!
Unions should call for a national one-day strike and walk-out of students and workers and build for a mass nationally coordinated protest against the genocide.
No to Harris and Trump - build for the largest possible vote for Left antiwar pro-worker candidate Jill Stein, as a step towards a new antiwar party for the working class.
For nearly a year, the Israeli government has carried out a genocidal war against Gaza. This war, only possible with U.S. political support and military funding by Democratic President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris, and both parties of U.S. imperialism, has unleashed an unimaginable human catastrophe on the Palestinian people. The Israeli military — the fourth-largest in the world — has imposed barbaric conditions, relentless bombing, blockade, and forced displacement. The roots of this crisis are in the brutal occupation of Gaza, which has been known for decades as the world’s largest “open-air prison.”
The Lancet has estimated that upwards of 335,500 Palestinian people have been killed in Gaza, directly or indirectly, because of the war, accounting for 14.2 percent of Gaza's population. Just hours after the Biden-Harris regime approved a new $3.5 billion shipment of arms and weaponry to Israel on Friday, August 9th, the Israeli military bombed a school building with Palestinians sheltering inside it, savagely killing over 100 people, many of them children. Israel has also brutally killed over 600 civilians in the West Bank, including socialist and University of Washington graduate, 26-year-old Ayşenur Ezgi Aygi. And there is now a serious threat of a wider regional war in the Middle East, with the Israeli state’s recently launched bombings in Lebanon, which have already taken the lives of over a thousand, and displaced more than a million people.
On August 13th, mere days after the gruesome bombing of the Gaza school building, the Biden-Harris State Department approved yet another arms sale to the Israeli state, this one worth a stunning $20 billion. The money will be used to deploy weapons to Israel over the next several years, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, 33,000 tank cartridges, up to 50,000 mortar cartridges, and new military cargo vehicles. This represents the largest single weapons package ever from U.S. imperialism to the Israeli state.
Even before the violence over the last year, more than 80 percent of the people in Gaza had been living in poverty under the brutal occupation of the Israeli state. The massacre of the Palestinian people, many of whom were already made destitute under the occupation, including the gut-wrenching numbers of babies and children killed, has led to mass outcry from working people across the world.
A majority (70 percent) of American working people oppose the Israeli state’s war on Gaza. According to a May survey, a majority continue to support a permanent ceasefire and humanitarian assistance in Gaza, and think that if conflict escalates between Israel and Iran, the U.S. military should have “little to no involvement.”
Millions of working and young people have participated in thousands of antiwar protests globally since the beginning of the war. In the United States, protests have been led by many organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, in multiracial and multireligious solidarity with the people of Gaza. This past spring, students at hundreds of American college campuses launched a wave of protests and encampments demanding a ceasefire, an end to the Israeli state’s occupation of Palestinian land, and an end to U.S. funding of the Israeli military. These protests correctly held President Joe Biden responsible as the warmonger-in-chief, with him having sent over $50 billion to the Israeli military since October 7th. This includes the $20 billion in arms sales approved by the Biden-Harris administration in mid-August, to be sent over the next several years and representing the largest single weapons funding to Israel.
“Uncommitted,” Abandon Harris, and the Antiwar and Muslim Vote in the U.S. Presidential Election
In a historic development, over 740,000 Democratic Party voters, especially Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Americans, refused to vote for Biden in the Presidential primaries and voted “Uncommitted” instead, as a warning that allowing the slaughter of Gaza could cause Biden and the Democrats to lose the election. This “Uncommitted” effort was led by the Listen to Michigan campaign, with over 100,000 voters casting an “Uncommitted” ballot in the Michigan primary election.
Prior to that, Arab, Muslim, and other antiwar activists launched the Abandon Biden campaign last year, giving Biden the deadline of October 31st to enact a ceasefire. Abandon Biden activists participated in the “Uncommitted” primary vote, but in a historic development, had also publicly vowed by November 1st “to never vote for Biden and to actively campaign against him.”
While Joe Biden may have stepped aside as the Democratic Presidential nominee, it would be a dangerous mistake to think that Kamala Harris would be any better for the people of Gaza and the antiwar movement, or for working people as a whole. Harris has been the other half of the Biden-Harris administration throughout this war. Without the steady 10 flow of military and political support from the Biden-Harris administration, the Israeli state could not continue this genocidal war. Harris, like Biden, is fully complicit in this genocide in progress, and has repeatedly made it clear she will continue to extend unequivocal support to Israel’s war. In an August interview with CNN, Harris said she will not stop the delivery of American military weapons to Israel.
Trump is not an alternative either, and has made it clear he will also double down on the genocidal war on Gaza, if elected, as well as further ratchet up the conflict with China. Both Harris and Trump represent the interests of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, which are determined to support the Israeli state’s war to the hilt because they see Israel as their most crucial ally in the oil-rich Middle East and a key partner in the New Cold War between the U.S. and China.
The full complicity of both the Democratic and Republican Parties in this horrific war was on sickening display when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received 58 separate standing ovations from the U.S. Congress during his speech in July.
American workers and the antiwar movement cannot place any faith in either Democrats or Republicans to end the war on Gaza, any more than we can rely on them to fund working-class needs over billionaire greed. Organizing against the genocide has to mean taking a stand against genocide in the U.S. Presidential election, which concretely means rejecting both Harris and Trump and their warmongering parties. Similarly, the antiwar movement in other countries cannot rely on the capitalist politicians there, either.
The national leadership of “Uncommitted” has, unfortunately, refused to challenge the Democratic Party. In a mid-September statement, these leaders stopped short of formally endorsing Harris. But they also rejected both a vote for any antiwar candidate and abstaining from the election, 11 which is a backdoor way of calling for a vote for Harris. Workers Strike Back disagrees with this position of the national “Uncommitted” leadership, and agrees with the local leaders and rank and file of “Uncommitted,” many of whom have publicly disagreed with the national “Uncommitted” leadership, and have called for rejecting Harris in the election. State and local members and leaders of “Uncommitted” have also talked about a lack of democracy inside the campaign, with national leaders close to the Democratic Party appointing themselves as spokespeople for the 740,000 people who voted “Uncommitted.” Ethan Eblaghie, a member of the Coordinating Committee for Listen to Maryland, has written about the “unaccountable movement leaders [who] were unwilling to punish Democrats for supporting genocide.”
In contrast, as Harris was being anointed the Democratic Party nominee at the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Abandon Biden activists gathered in the city to re-launch their campaign as Abandon Harris, understanding that Harris was no different than Biden in terms of continuing the Democratic Party’s unconditional support for the Israeli state. Abandon Harris have also said: “Punishing the vice-president for her genocide would send a clear signal to the political landscape that genocide is not politically viable. It would create a political earthquake, soliciting a reckoning in the political parties.” Workers Strike Back is working alongside Abandon Harris and other antiwar activists who want to take an unambiguous and unapologetic stand against Harris and Trump in the Presidential election, in Abandon Biden co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam speaks at the Workers Strike Back protest at the DNC in August 2024, after relaunching as Abandon Harris 12 order to build the antiwar movement.
Capitalism and imperialism are global, and we need to build a strong international antiwar movement in order to end this genocidal war and prevent wider war in the Middle East and beyond. Ending the war will require workers and the labor movement to carry out coordinated strike actions to disrupt and shut down capitalist production and exert real pressure. It will also require the antiwar movement to build independently of the parties of big business and the interests of imperialism. In the United States, that means we need to break from both the Democratic and Republican Parties, and to begin building a new antiwar, working-class party. Such a party must be rooted in movements, and have genuine democratic structures, with leadership being held accountable to working people and the party’s program.
As a step towards that, it is imperative that working and young people in the United States build for a unified vote for Jill Stein, the strongest independent, antiwar, pro-worker Presidential candidate.
An August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found Stein essentially tied with Harris among Muslim American voters nationally. The poll also shows Stein leading Harris among Muslim American voters in the crucial “swing states” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, with Stein polling at 40 percent and Harris at 12 percent in Michigan. A September 2024 poll conducted by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, found that Jill Stein leading both Harris and Trump among Muslim voters in three key swing states.
In collaboration with Abandon Harris, over three dozen Imams and religious scholars and leaders issued a public letter at the end of September, calling on Muslim voters to spurn Harris and vote for an antiwar candidate like Jill Stein. The authors said in the letter: “We may not know what the future holds, but we know this: we will not taint our hands by voting for or supporting an administration that has brought so much bloodshed upon our brothers and sisters.”
We need to fight to win every possible vote for Jill Stein, which is why Workers Strike Back and Abandon Harris are working together, including by hosting joint rallies with the Jill Stein campaign in Dearborn, Michigan, and Seattle, Washington. Workers Strike Back also agrees with Hassan Abdel Salam, co-founder of Abandon Harris, who has said that we need to send the clearest possible message to the warmongering Democratic Party by doing everything possible to defeat Harris in Michigan. The line of history runs through Michigan.
An Unprecedented Antiwar Movement in Solidarity with Gaza
Since the start of the war on Gaza, support for the antiwar movement has grown, even as U.S. military support for Israel has continued unabated. In the spring, college campuses around the world saw encampments spring up in solidarity with the Palestinian people, following the brutal arrests by police of student protesters at Columbia University. By mid- 14 April, there were over 100 of these encampments in the United States alone.
These protests gained mass support, but ultimately failed to expand beyond college campuses. Some, like those at Columbia and UCLA, were confronted with police violence and immediate crackdowns. Others, like the encampment at the University of Washington, unfortunately made the mistake of becoming overly focused on private negotiations around divestment with hostile university administrations, rather than using the enormous support for the encampments to organize mass protests of students and workers.
A wider appeal with the demands to end the war and all military funding to the Israeli state could have mobilized tens of thousands of people and greatly strengthened the antiwar movement. Specifically, the protests could have oriented much more towards protests at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). By doing so, they could have connected the campus movement to a broader antiwar and anti-imperialist movement. Instead, on the basis of a negotiation-oriented strategy focused on campus administrations, only a small handful of the campus groups won even minor concessions. Police, including officers on horseback, swarm to suppress protests at the University of Austin in April 2024, arresting 34 protesters 15 Meanwhile, many Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump, Biden, and Harris routinely demonized any protests against the war, wielding slanderous accusations of anti-semitism and reaffirming their support for the Israeli war machine. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a prominent Democrat, Vice Presidential contender, and arch-advocate of the war and of the Israeli state, likened the protesters to the KKK.
As the school year drew to a close, and without any clear strategy to take the movement forward, these university-based protests found themselves to be unsustainable. In their absence, many were left with a burning question — how can we keep up the fight, and harness the enormous support for the antiwar movement into action?
We still need to continue to build a powerful resistance to the war on Gaza. There may be renewed student protests on college campuses in the autumn. It is important that these new protests be built strongly, and learn the lessons of the spring protest movement. It is important that the protests present a broader program calling for a total end to U.S. military support for Israel, for an end to the occupation, and for strike action by campus and other unions. The protests should also publicly reject Harris, and call for support for antiwar candidate Jill Stein as an alternative to the warmongering Harris and Trump in the elections. They also need to link up across campuses to build a lasting student-and-worker-led antiwar organization, with an elected leadership accountable to the movement, drawing on the experience of organizations that were imperative for ending the Vietnam War. As the war rages on and threatens to spiral, we need to urgently learn the lessons of the successful anti-war movements.
The Role of Unions and the Labor Movement
Alongside the student protest movement, major unions across the country (including UAW, SEIU, the American Postal Workers’ Union, and many more, totalling over six million workers) have passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Seven unions, including the National Education Association and the United Auto Workers, together representing six million union members, took the unprecedented step of a public and unified call for the U.S. to end military funding to Israel.
Organized labor holds immense potential power — the kind of power that’s necessary to end this genocidal war. The ceasefire resolutions need to be followed up with organizing nationwide days of strike action. Such strike actions can shut down corporate profits to demand, in the only language that the bosses understand, an immediate and permanent ceasefire and end to U.S. military support for Israel.
Unfortunately, much of labor leadership, including in UAW President Shawn Fain campaigns for Kamala Harris in Wayne, Michigan in August 2024 17 the major unions that have so far passed resolutions for ceasefire and ending U.S. funding to the Israeli military, is tied at the hip to the same warmongering Democratic Party that is at the helm of this genocidal war.
The same labor leaders had previously all endorsed warmonger-in-chief Biden, and later gushingly endorsed Harris within days of her coronation, without any discussion or vote by their rank-and-file membership. UAW (United Auto Workers union) leader Shawn Fain said that he “would not rush” to endorse Harris, and then endorsed her barely a week later. Fain also spoke at the Democratic National Convention, cheerleading for Harris.
All this unfortunately represents a dead end for both the antiwar movement and for working people.
We need a rank-and-file rebellion in the labor movement against support for the warmongering Democratic and Republican parties. Instead of rushing to endorse Kamala Harris, the leadership of unions should have organized mass protests outside the DNC, actively supported the campus antiwar movement, and engaged in coordinated strike action to force those in power to end their support for Israel’s war.
In response to the University of California (UC) administration’s crackdown on the antiwar encampments, UAW 4811 — the union representing the 48,000 graduate student employees, postdocs, and undergraduate workers across the UC’s ten campuses — engaged in strike action. This was an important example, which should have been taken up and spread to many other campuses. Other unions of university employees could have gone on strike in solidarity with protesters and echoed their demands. The strike by UAW 4811 also should have been organized as an all-out strike. Instead, it was organized as a slow building up – similar to the “Stand Up” strike at the Big Three automakers last fall. This limited 18 the impact of the strike and allowed the university to win a court injunction against the strike before it was able to reach its full potential. There is much more that could have been done, if all the union leaders willing to call for a ceasefire were also willing to fight for it and stand up against both campus administrations and the political establishment.
Rank-and-file union members should urgently bring forward resolutions for a vote in their unions, calling for rescinding the endorsements of Harris, and breaking from both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Some Workers Strike Back members have already launched an effort to bring forward such a resolution in their unions.
Working People and the Antiwar Movement Need to Reject both Harris and Trump
Israel has long been seen by the U.S. ruling class as its key strategic partner in the oil-rich Middle East. As Joe Biden said in 1986, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” Both Democratic and Republican administrations over the last three-quarters of a century have consistently supplied Israel with military aid to act as an operating base for its interests in the region and to carry out its brutal occupation, to the tune of $158 billion. This has meant that Israel has received more foreign aid from the U.S. than any other country since WWII.
In the recent period, the global dominance of the Unit- 19 ed States is growing increasingly uncertain. U.S. imperialism is being challenged more and more by China, and the conflict between the two imperialist powers is leading into what we described above as a new Cold War, with Israel as partner to the U.S. in this conflict.
For both of these reasons, it’s extremely unlikely that either the Democrats or the Republicans will ever truly support an end to American military funding of Israel. The $20 billion arms funding announced in August, to be carried out over several years, is another piece of evidence that this is a longterm project of the U.S. capitalist class.
The war on Gaza is inherently connected to the wider inter-imperialist struggle. Meanwhile, Hamas is backed by Iran, which is in turn an important ally of China. In the eyes of U.S. imperialists, Israel is a necessary bulwark against Chinese influence dominating the Middle East, something deeply unfavorable to American capitalism.
At the time of writing, there has been a significant escalation of this conflict towards a wider regional war in the Middle East, following the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut, and with Israel planning an imminent ground operation in Lebanon. If such a war were to break out, we should see it for what it is — a proxy war between the two imperialist superpowers of the United States and China, waged over dominance of the Middle East, with the working class of all countries involved caught in the crossfire. Trump would back Israel to the hilt, if elected. He has been openly hostile to the antiwar movement and the campus protests.
Trump has claimed that Columbia University’s protesters included “paid agitators” and called the police repression of the protests and the encampments a “beautiful thing to watch.”
He praised the NYPD in their crackdown, saying “I’m 20 so proud of New York’s finest. They’re great.”
Trump also said about the LAPD that ”they did a really good job at UCLA,” in reference to police brutalization of student protesters.
Working people and the antiwar movement also cannot afford to support Kamala Harris and her pro-war, anti-worker agenda. The Democratic Party is just as much a representative of the interests of the wealthy, and hostile to working people and the labor movement, as the Republican Party. Biden called himself the most pro-labor President, but he and the majority of the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress broke the railroad workers’ strike. The Biden-Harris administration also blatantly broke his promise to push for a $15/ hour minimum wage. Biden-Harris ended the child tax credit expansion, which had made a major dent in poverty among families with young children, and plunged those families back into poverty. As Biden’s Vice President, Harris was party to all these anti-worker decisions, and did not speak publicly in disagreement with Biden. Since her coronation as the Democratic Presidential candidate, her campaign has doubled down on her support for U.S. military aid to Israel and for fracking, and her opposition to Medicare for All.
In the 2020 Presidential election, Harris received campaign contributions from more billionaires than any other candidate running at the time. Since being crowned the nominee following Biden’s departure from the race this year, Harris has once again amassed massive donations from the wealthy, both directly to her campaign and through superPACs. The same is true for Donald Trump, who has support from a section of the billionaire class, despite its overall preference for Harris.
Harris is also the main benefactor in the Presidential election from AIPAC, the largest U.S.-based pro-Israeli-state 21 lobbying group, which is itself funded by many billionaires. Harris has received well over $5 million from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby organizations over the course of her political career, including the campaign coffers she inherited this year from Biden’s failed bid.
AIPAC has poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaigns of Democrats and Republicans willing to toe the line on the Israeli state’s genocidal war and on its ongoing brutal occupation of Palestinian lands. Most recently, AIPAC pumped $23 million into defeating Squad members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in the Democratic primary, simply for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Lessons from the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
The antiwar protests so far show the potential that exists for them to grow into a powerful mass movement, and needless to say, the U.S. ruling class does not want that. Kamala Harris has received more than $5 million from pro-Israel lobby organizations like AIPAC over the course of her political career 22.
The movement against the war in Iraq revealed mass anger against both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Globally, an estimated 36 million people attended anti-Iraqwar protests in 2003 alone. While the protests eventually receded, the widespread opposition to the war continued for years. It had major political ramifications for the ruling class, including contributing to millions of working people supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primaries, who relentlessly pointed out war hawk Hillary Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war.
To an even greater extent, the mass protest movement against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s had a massive impact on American politics, and helped radicalize an entire generation, alongside the Civil Rights movement that preceded it. That antiwar movement then, combined with the potent factor of the opposition to the war by American soldiers and veterans themselves, ended the war and dealt a decisive blow to the authority of U.S. imperialism and capitalism. All of these movements together, along with militant labor struggles, led to historic progressive victories: the passing of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling for abortion rights, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, Affirmative Action, and many others. These gains were won despite the fact that President Nixon was a reactionary, right-wing politician, and the Supreme Court had a conservative majority.
Ultimately, mass movements and working-class power is what brings progressive change, regardless of which of the War veterans with Vietnam Veterans Against the War demonstrate on June 1, 1967 23 capitalist parties is in power. The labor movement, in particular, is a key force that could have a decisive impact in blocking the advance of this war.
We Need a New Anti-war Working-Class Party!
A Decade of Lessons from Kshama Sawant’s Socialist City Council Office
As discussed above, the working class cannot rely on the goodwill of either of the two parties of big business. Indeed, what working people need can only be won by getting far better organized and breaking from these two parties — a $25 minimum wage, affordable housing and free healthcare for all, workers’ rights, solutions to the climate crisis, an end to imperialism and attacks on oppressed people everywhere, and more.
We also cannot put our faith in nominally “progressive” Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Squad members, and Bernie Sanders. They have failed to follow through on their promises to the working class, and instead folded at every opportunity to the Democratic establishment. AOC, for example, voted to block the railroad workers’ strike in 2022, and tacitly supported a $1 billion package of military aid for the Israeli state’s Iron Dome.
And as mentioned above, Squad member Jamaal Bowman lost his primary this year in a landslide to a pro-genocidal-war establishment Democratic opponent. Similarly, Squad member Cori Bush lost her primary in Missouri. Bowman 24 openly supported the Iron Dome, changing his public position much later. Like AOC, both Bowman and Bush sold out working people by helping to block the railroad workers’ strike, and rushed to endorse Harris for President.
Bush’s opponent this year actually received 5,000 fewer votes than the Democratic incumbent that she beat in 2020. But her own vote total dropped even more dramatically, by nearly 17,000 votes.
Bowman and Bush’s losses are no accident, and despite the deluge by the pro-Israel lobby, they are not mainly about the electoral math of AIPAC cash. They are about the betrayals by Bowman and Bush of their working-class base and the total loss of enthusiasm for them and their campaigns.
Whatever good intentions they may have had when they ran for office, these progressive elected representatives made the fundamentally incorrect decision of becoming part of the Democratic Party, and then surrendering to the pressure from the party’s leadership. Working-class leaders need to take the establishment head on, build movements & inspire workers to fight. The political establishment expects nothing less than total allegiance to the warmongering agenda of U.S. capitalism. And by frequently betraying working-class people while giving just as frequent nods to the elite, Bowman and Bush faced both the brunt of ruling-class opposition and also the alienation of working people, who refused to come out to fight for them.
We see a similar dynamic play out on a local scale every day. In Seattle, it was not the progressive Democrats of the City Council that won the resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The resolution was put forward by socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and it was working people and antiwar activists fighting alongside her office that forced the hand of the Council Democrats. In fact, the Democratic Party Coun- 25 cilmembers repeatedly maneuvered to undermine and block the resolution, and later to water it down, stripping out provisions calling for an end to U.S. military funding of Israel and an end to the occupation. It’s very unlikely it would have passed at all without collective pressure from working people, and from Sawant using her position to expose the role of the Democrats.
Several members of Workers Strike Back have won resolutions calling for a ceasefire within their respective unions by organizing with rank-and-file members. This shows what we are capable of when we stand together and do not limit ourselves to what’s acceptable to the leadership of a political party or of our own union. A true workers’ party — something capable of standing up to the Democrats and Republicans on a national scale — is what we need, and it won’t build itself. It is something we need to take concrete steps toward right now. As capitalism descends further and further into crisis, the Left has both an opportunity and an obligation to break with the parties that do not (and have never) worked for us. Building a new party will certainly be an uphill battle — but as we have seen time and again, when we fight, we can win.
Workers Strike Back was co-founded by Kshama Sawant, whose office, alongside other socialists and working people, won historic victories, beginning with making Seattle Kshama Sawant speaks alongside antiwar activists at rally in November 2023 to demand that City Council Democrats pass a ceasefire resolution 26 the first major city to win the $15/hour minimum wage in 2014. Because we won inflation adjustment, Seattle now has the highest minimum wage in any major city in the nation at $19.97 an hour. Our Seattle victory opened up the floodgates for the “Fight for 15” to win gains in city after city, benefiting literally millions of low-paid workers.
Kshama set the standard for an elected representative of the working class.She took home the average wage of a worker, and donated the rest of her six-figure salary into a solidarity fund for social and labor struggle. She used her office as a platform to organize working people and build movements around concrete demands like the $15/hour wage, taxes on the rich, and renters’ rights, including rent control.
All this represents an unfortunately unique example of what working-class politics needs to look like. This framework is essential for the party working people need.
Kshama’s office also won many other victories, including the Amazon Tax to fund affordable housing to the tune of over $214 million annually. We won a long list of renters’ rights laws, which corporate landlords are enraged about and pressing the new City Council to undermine and even dismantle. These include the right to an attorney for tenants facing eviction; a Kshama Sawant rallies with supporters to launch the Tax Amazon campaign in November 2019, at the victory party for her re-election campaign, in which Amazon spent heavily to defeat her 27 requirement for six months’ notice for all evictions, caps on exorbitant move-in fees and a payment plan for them; schoolyear and winter eviction moratoriums; the requirement that landlords pay relocation assistance worth three months’ rent for rent increases of more than 10%; banning rent increases on buildings with housing code violations; a $10 cap on the late fees landlords can charge for overdue rent; and an end to exploitative “junk fees.”
This record of working-class victories stands out in the U.S. Left as a powerful example in recent times of what can be won using class struggle methods, not by wishful thinking that Democrats are friends of working people.
This Presidential Election: Vote for Jill Stein, the Strongest Independent Left Candidate
At our inaugural Zoom conference in July, Workers Strike Back members democratically discussed and voted to endorse Jill Stein in the 2024 Presidential election. While we recognize that the Green Party does not represent the kind of mass workers’ party we so urgently need, a vote for Stein is a crucial step in that direction. Stein is the strongest antiwar candidate on the side of the working class, and the only Left candidate who will be on the ballot for the majority of voters across the nation. Support for Stein among Muslim American voters is a powerful indication. Every vote for Stein is a vote against genocide, a vote for a concrete step in the direction of a new political party for workers and the antiwar 28 movement, and a vote AGAINST the pro-war, anti-worker agenda of both major parties. Every vote for Harris or Trump is a vote for genocide.
Stein’s policies are far more pro-worker than those of any Democrat or Republican — a $25/hour minimum wage, guaranteed affordable housing, free childcare, and canceling student debt, among many more. Stein’s platform calls for taking the big banks, pharmaceutical industry, and energy companies into democratic public ownership. Stein has been consistent in calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to U.S. military funding for Israel. In April of this year, she was arrested for participating in a campus antiwar protest.
The biggest possible vote for Jill Stein would demonstrate to the working class of America that the demand for independent Left politics exists, and that political alternatives are possible if we fight for them. Even a million votes for Stein would be a powerful step in the right direction. If even a fraction of those million people were to get active following the election in fighting against the new administration, whether Harris or Trump, and in building working-class movements like Workers Strike Back, it could have a transformative effect on U.S. politics. Although Stein is highly unlikely to win the election in November, a strong turnout behind her could become a galvanizing victory of its own for the working-class struggle in the years to come. This is also why Workers Strike Back Stein stands with antiwar protesters in April 2024 at Washington University in St. Louis, where she was arrested 29 is calling for a mass organizing conference in February 2025 to take forward the momentum from the Stein campaign, the antiwar movement, and workers’ struggles into the new year.
What is the Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict?
Most of the corporate media, which are mouthpieces for the interests of capitalism and imperialism, portray the Israel-Palestine conflict as an unavoidable clash borne out of pre-existing religious and ethnic hatred. The Israeli and U.S. states say that the only solution is the obliteration of Hamas.
But it is the Israeli state’s brutal occupation, state terrorism, and apartheid-like policies that are at the root of this crisis.
Israel’s brutal, decades-long occupation of Gaza has created the basis for the current conflict. And repeated state violence by Israel against the Palestinian people has only led to a steady worsening of the situation. The October 7th attack by Hamas was a brutal terrorist act, and must be condemned, but it took place in the context of decades of Israeli state terrorism backed up by U.S. and Western imperialism. Hamas itself arose from those conditions. It was originally sponsored by the Israeli state as a counterweight to Left Palestinian nationalism which the Israeli ruling class feared. Similarly, the U.S. support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet military led directly to the creation of Al Qaeda, which created the conditions for 9/11. Imperialist violence leads to blowback, and ordinary people pay the price.
For Palestinians, all previous supposed “peace talks,” 30 “accords,” and other initiatives by capitalist leaders have yielded nothing other than more war and the doubling down of Israeli occupation. The Saudi Peace Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Tenet Plan, the Oslo Accord, and the Camp David Accord all ended in abject failure, and ultimately served as nothing but public relations events for the political establishment, providing cover for the further expansion of Israeli settlements and military presence in the West Bank and Gaza.
In the meantime, over the last three decades, most Palestinian people have experienced a precipitous decline in living conditions. Even before the latest violence, more than 80 percent of the people in Gaza had been living in poverty, with access to clean water and electricity at crisis levels. The unemployment rate in Gaza was 46 percent in the second quarter of this year, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Conditions are also hard for the Israeli working class and poor, who struggle with an ongoing cost of living crisis, as well as security concerns due to the conflict. There are enormous class divisions within Israel, just like in any nation under capitalism. About 20 percent of Israelis — almost two million people — are living below the poverty line. A staggering number of Israelis are forced to skip medical treatments and forego medication to pay for other basics. Mass protests erupted in Israel in July 2023, against Netanyahu and his government’s rightwing judicial reform 31 The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics data shows that many households are unable to afford basic monthly payments for utilities, food, and education.
This is not due to a lack of resources. Forty-two of the Forbes’ World Billionaires List for 2024 are Israeli, and the wealth of the richest 500 individuals in Israel has grown tenfold over the last two decades.
Like the United States elite, the Israeli government, with the agreement of all the major parties of the Israeli ruling class, has carried out severe cuts to social services for working people and the poor, while ruthlessly representing the interests of the wealthy and financing the war machine. And as is the norm under capitalism, it’s not the major corporations that have borne the brunt of the war, but the smallest and most struggling Israeli businesses, nearly 60,000 of which are expected to shut down this year.
Israel has the second-highest per-capita military spending in the world. And it is Israeli workers who are forced to pay for the nation’s highly militarized regime. While workers have faced billions of dollars in cuts, the military budget has been increased to around $23.6 billion as of this year, which surpasses the total military spending of Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Jordan combined.
Ordinary Israeli Jews, understandably, do not want a return of Hamas, and desperately want an end to the terror that the decades of conflict has brought about. But the Israeli ruling class has proven itself totally incapable of providing anything but insecurity for Israelis. Netanyahu himself has become deeply unpopular, having embroiled the nation in a drawn-out war, with the failed promise of rescuing Israeli hostages from Hamas.
The only way to bring about peace, stability and an end 32 to the conflict is on the basis of a united working-class movement basing itself on the common interests of workers across ethnic lines.
Palestinians must have the right to self-determination. At the same time, the security concerns of the Israeli people must be taken into account.
The Israeli state policy accomplishes neither of these. It is in essence a bloody divide-and-rule strategy that depends on maintaining a deep polarization between the Israeli and Palestinian working class and poor.
The Palestinian people have a right to defend themselves, and people living under occupation have the right to resist and to defend themselves with force. They need international working-class solidarity for their struggle for national and social liberation, and their revolutionary uprising, the Intifada. However terrorist actions, like those of Hamas, are both indefensible and totally counterproductive to the struggle. Palestinians need democratically organized action committees, including organized self-defense committees of the working class in the region.
We need a struggle to unite Israeli and Palestinian working people around a working-class and socialist program, against the Israeli state’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and against U.S. and Western imperialism. This needs to be combined with a fight to win better living standards for ordinary people on both sides.
We need to support the right of both Palestinians and Israelis to have their own independent state, if they choose. At the same time, all Palestinians within Israel need equal rights, and the existing system of apartheid needs to be completely smashed. Working-class Palestinians and Israelis both need living-wage jobs, trade union rights, free education, healthcare, childcare, and affordable housing. Neither has any shared interests with the Israeli ruling class which is carrying out 33 economic and political attacks against both, while escalating the conflict.
After decades of bloodshed, and with the current horrors of the Israeli war, it is understandable if some feel despair or that the situation is immutable. However, history shows that it is absolutely possible for ordinary people to get organized and fight back against seemingly insurmountable odds. But it will need to be on the basis of working-class solidarity.
A strategic task in the Palestinian struggle must be to appeal to Israeli workers, youth and soldiers, in order to develop unity along class lines, explaining that neither ordinary Israelis nor Palestinians have an interest in fighting a hopeless war that will never bring security or peace. Ignoring the need for class solidarity is only playing into the hands of Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing and Western imperialism. Mass organized Palestinian struggle can show the way to a united struggle.
A united struggle by ordinary Palestinians and Israelis would also be a beacon for the whole region, where working and poor people are suffering under repressive regimes, including those in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The Middle East is one of the richest regions of the world with its enormous oil wealth. But this wealth has been siphoned off by kings, dictators, and foreign capitalists, leaving the masses living in abject poverty and without basic social services. A report last year by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia found that 130 million people — a third of the Arab population — live under the poverty line.
The Arab Spring, which inspired the world in 2011 and raised the prospect of revolution in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and beyond, has been brutally crushed, as has the mass movement in Iran in 2022 and 2023 following the killing of Mahsa Amini 34 by the state’s morality police. A concrete advancement of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, on the basis of uniting Israeli and Palestinian people around a working-class program including an end to U.S. imperialism in the region, could reignite mass movements across the Middle East.
As history since the Palestinian Authority was established 30 years ago has shown, an independent capitalist Palestine would still be under the subjugation of a much stronger Israeli state backed by U.S. imperialism. Only by taking the enormous wealth of the entire region under democratic control of the working class and poor, can the basic needs of the masses be met. This is the only real basis to end the conflict and the wider crisis in the region: a socialist solution. An independent, socialist Palestine, alongside a socialist Israel, as part of a wider voluntary federation of a socialist Middle East.
The victory of the working class in the Russian Revolution in 1917, and its spread across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to form the basis for the Soviet Union, provides a vital real-life example to show that such a monumental change is possible.
Only on a socialist basis can the Palestinian people achieve real liberation – true independence from domination by the Israeli state and Western imperialism, the right to demEgyptian protesters occupy Tahrir Square in 2011, forcing the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak and his government 35 ocratically control their lives, and an end to oppression and economic exploitation.
This will have to come from below, a struggle by the different peoples of the region — Palestinians, Arabs, and Israelis — against their common enemies, namely, Israeli capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and Arab capitalism. This will need to be joined by mass movements of working people internationally.
The Israeli state’s genocidal war on Gaza, combined with the bloody inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, are both part of the broader Cold War conflict between the U.S. and China, which is preparing the ground for the potential of a direct war between the two nuclear-armed superpowers. We also see ongoing civil wars ravaging sub-Saharan Africa. All this is a reminder of the urgent necessity of a global workingclass-led antiwar movement, including massive coordinated strike actions.
Get Organized with Workers Strike Back and Keep Up the Fight!
The working class needs a new party, and the actions described above are the immediate, tangible first steps towards building it. Kamala Harris and the Democrats do not represent a future for working people — nor do Donald Trump and the Republicans.
The encampments and protests on college campuses this spring represented an admirable fight against war and im- 36 perialism, but working and young people need to go further if we want lasting change. We must take direct aim at the power structures enabling Israel’s genocidal war, and break with the two U.S. parties backing it. We must demand an immediate end to U.S. military funding to the Israeli state, an end to the brutal occupation, and a permanent ceasefire. It is imperative that we show the world we can keep up the fight, and that we take our struggle into this election to support antiwar candidate Jill Stein, stand in solidarity with efforts like Abandon Harris, and continue to build our movement after November.
No individual can defeat the bosses and the warmongers alone. But when we get organized in working-class solidarity, we can take on a power far greater than ourselves and win. Right now, Workers Strike Back is organizing across the country, fighting to advance the needs of working people everywhere. The Presidential election this year represents one such opportunity, to begin laying the groundwork for a break with the two parties of capitalism. It is time for working people to stand up, organize, and take what we deserve — a world that works for us, instead of the billionaires.
Will you join us?
solidarity@workersstrikeback.org
Workers Strike Back was co-founded by Kshama Sawant, who was an independent socialist on the Seattle City Council for ten years, winning what's now the nation's highest minimum wage at $20/hour, the Amazon Tax, and historic renters' rights. WorkersStrikeBack.Org/Join
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